Self-Censorship And The BBC

 

 

‘….a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism…’

 

 

We had a quick look at the BBC’s ‘Dateline’ before [H/T Is the BBC biased?] and its denouncements that any investigation into the Trojan Horse schools is divisive and Islamophobic.  Gavin Esler made no attempt at impartial adjudication, his mind already made up that there is no such thing as ‘British values’…however he declared that to promote such values would be at the expense of Muslim values….so figure the logic of that if you can.

One comment did stand out, from American commentator Jef McAllister, who claimed that ethnic minorities all lived together in Britain because they were afraid of the native’s racism.

No…they live together because that’s where the work is, where the cheap accomodation is and because they want to be amongst their own kind.  So if there is any ‘racism’ surely it must be their own, wanting to live with ‘their own kind’….if that is ‘racism’.

 

 

That aside the attitude of see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing concerning the Trojan Horse scandal is something that has been around a long time and in fact is what allows such events to happen as the ‘Liberal Establishment’ looks away and refuses to condemn such behaviour if it possibly can.

 

In 2008 Nick Cohen wrote this:

Self-Censorship And The BBC

It looked at those very same attitudes that silently endorsed extremism in our midst:

• It makes no sense until you understand the moral contortions of the postmodern liberal establishment. In the past few years, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the West Midlands Police, the liberal press, the Liberal Democrats, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Lord Chief Justice and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all either supported ultra-reactionary doctrines or made libellous accusations against the critics of radical Islam. All have sought to prove their liberal tolerance by supporting the most illiberal and intolerant wing of British Islam, and by blocking out the voices of its Muslim and non-Muslim critics as they do it.
• As the sorry history of The London Bombers shows, they have left us a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism that it dare not meet the eyes of the face that stares back at it from the mirror.

 

 

 

Cohen’s article was based upon a film the BBC commissioned but never made, one about ‘The London Bombers’ of 7/7…..not made because it was deemed ‘Islamophobic’.

• The reporters convinced the families of three of the four bombers to cooperate. By the end, they agreed that the BBC’s account of their sons and brothers’ lives and deaths was accurate. Cafolla submitted five versions of the script. He was working up to a final draft when the BBC abandoned the project.
• The official reason is that the drama didn’t make the grade. The script is circulating in Samizdat form, which is how it reached Standpoint, and every writer and director who has read it disagrees. The journalists, however, say that BBC managers told them they were stopping because it was “Islamophobic”.

 

 

But there is one more important revelation that the BBC would not want to gain general acceptance…..that ‘radicalisation’ is not due to foreign policy as is so often claimed on the BBC, but is a result of other influences:

• The London Bombers, one of the most thoroughly researched and politically important drama-documentaries commissioned by British television. A team of journalists, at least one of whom was a British Muslim, reported to Terry Cafolla, a fine writer who won many awards for his dramatisation of the religious hatred which engulfed the Holy Cross school in Belfast.

• The reporters spent months in Beeston, the Leeds slum where three of the four 7/7 bombers – Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussein and Shehzad Tanweer – grew up. Unusually for journalists working within BBC groupthink, they didn’t find that the “root cause” of murderous rage was justifiable anger at the “humiliation” America, Israel, Britain and Denmark and her tactless cartoonists had inflicted on Muslims.

• Instead, they inadvertently confirmed the ideas of Ernest Gellner, the late and unjustly neglected professor of anthropology at Cambridge. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992), Gellner asked why a puritanical version of Islam was in the ascendant when godlessness was flourishing everywhere else. His answer was that Wahhabism and its ever more zealous theocratic variants could appear as modern as secular humanism. They represented the pure religion of scholars and the city, which would free Muslims from their peasant parents’ embarrassingly superstitious faith. Accepting fanaticism was a mark of superiority: a visible sign of upward mobility from rural idiocy to urban sophistication.

 

So perhaps it was the attraction of a pure, fundamentalist Islam that was in the eyes of its proponents an ideology as compelling and progressive as the ‘Enlightenment’ is for the sockless, loafer wearing chatteratti of the BBC (unless that is it clashes with ‘Muslim values’).

Not foreign policy then?  Bit awkward for the BBC to put that forward….no Bush to blame, no empire and colonialism to blame, no alienation or disenfranchisement, just a powerful wish to identify with their own values, which happen to be polar opposites to Western ones.

Many Muslims became ‘radicalised’ long before 2001 0r 2003…hence of course 9/11….but it should be noted that after 9/11 many British Muslims suddenly became ‘devout’ and practising Muslims, identifying not with Britain, or British values, but with Islam and its values…..Islamist Salma Yaqoob admitted that 9/11 turned her into an ‘activist’ for Islamic issues.

9/11 was intended to do exactly that, to recruit Muslims around the world to ‘the cause’, not necessarily to be violent but ‘awakening’ them and ‘radicalising’ them to give them the confidence that whilst in small enclaves in ‘foreign countries’ they were not alone…the ‘Umma’ was out there and waiting for them to join.  ‘Rise up’ and demand your Islamic rights was the message.

9/11 was a battle cry.

Lawrence of Arabia said of the Arabs:

• Such people demanded a war-cry and banner from outside to combine them, and a stranger to lead them, one whose supremacy should be based on an idea: illogical, undeniable, discriminant: which instinct might accept and reason find no rational basis to reject or approve.  This was the binding assumption of the Arab movement; it was this which gave it an effective, if imbecile unanimity.

 

Exactly what Osama Bin Laden with his ‘big idea’ provided Muslims with.

 

Shame the BBC is in full-on denial mode about the truth.